Futuremark has now officially released its new Time Spy benchmark, an upgrade which adds the new DirectX 12 test to the 3DMark benchmarking software.

The Time Spy upgrade will be a free update for all Windows edition of the 3DMark, including the Steam demo and was, according to Futuremark, developed with input from AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft and all other members of the Benchmark Development Program.

The Time Spy will leverage the advantage of DirectX 12 as a low-level graphics API that reduces CPU overhead and brings better utilization of modern GPU hardware. The 3DMark Time Spy DirectX 12 benchmark will implement features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter and multi-threading.

The new 3DMark Time Spy benchmark renders at 2560x1440 resolution and includes a Demo, Graphics tests and a CPU test. The Advanced and Professional versions of the 3DMark will also have an ability to disable Async Compute which, according to some early tests, have similar gains on both Nvidia Pascal and AMD's latest Polaris graphics cards.

When it comes to multi-GPU support, the Time Spy takes advantage of DirectX 12 multi-GPU scaling and some early results are quite impressive as some graphics cards manage to double the score, showing a glimpse of what to expect from DirectX 12 and its multi-GPU performance.

The 3DMark Time Spy benchmark will certainly become a major part in any future graphics card testing on any review site and Futuremark is currently having a sale of 3DMark on Steam that runs until July 23 and includes all 3DMark benchmarks, as well as the new free Time Spy upgrade and VRMark Preview for US $9.99/€10.

AMD should officialy unveil its first Polaris GPU architecture based graphics card at Computex 2016 but now we have first alleged 3DMark performance figures for both Polaris 10 graphics cards.

To be probably named as the Radeon R9 480 and R9 480X, the two Polaris 10-based graphics card should be a part of the mid-range lineup but the results look quite promising as these offer somewhat higher performance compared to the Radeon R9 390 and R9 390X.

According to the results provided by Videocardz.com, the faster Polaris 10 graphics card should be close to the Radeon R9 Fury graphics card, at least in 3DMark. This also means that it should be faster than the GTX 980. The slower Polaris 10 graphics card, which should probably end up as the Radeon R9 480, could end up a tad slower than the Radeon R9 390X, but faster than the GTX 970. Videocardz.com also provided Crossfire results where two Radeon R9 480X are faster than the GTX Titan X graphics card, socring 25830 in 3DMark.

According to Videocardz, both Polaris 10 graphics report the same 8GB of VRAM and same 1266MHz GPU and 1925 and 2000MHz memory clocks. Bear in mind that these are just 3DMark results that could be using both older drivers as well as lower clocks but at least gives us a general idea on the performance.

Of course, we should know soon as AMD has already announced its Computex 2016 event for June 1st.

Just a couple of days before the official reviews are scheduled to appear online, we have some of the first alleged 3DMark scores of the Geforce GTX 1080, as well as some overclocking results, showing that the GTX 1080 is not only well ahead of GTX Titan X, GTX 980 Ti and Radeon R9 Fury X but also has an impressive overclocking potential.

Leaked by Videocardz.com, the benchmark results include 3DMark 11 Performance and Extreme as well as 3DMark FireStrike Performance, Extreme and Ultra benchmark preset scores on reference clocks as well as 3DMark FireStrike results when the GTX 1080 is overclocked to an impressive GPU clock of 2114MHz. The 2114MHz GPU clock is actually 381MHz higher than reference 1733MHz Boost GPU clock, which is certainly a great result and suggest that we will see some high factory-overclock versions from Nvidia AiB partners at Computex 2016 show.

According to the details provided by the source, the tested GTX 1080 had a boost clock of somewhere around 1860 to 1886MHz. Under reference clocks, the GTX 1080 is about 21 percent faster than the GTX Titan X and about 27 percent faster than AMD's flagship Fury X graphics card. When overclocked, the GTX 1080 raises that lead by additional 24 percent.

Of coruse, these are just a first leaked benchmark results so take them with a grain of salt as official reviews are just around the corner.

Futuremark has released a newest update for its 3DMark benchmark suite which adds a new user interface, includes a couple of other improvements and comes with a preview for the upcoming VRMark benchmark.

The new update pushes 3DMark to v2.0.1979 and includes a completely new user interface (UI) that has been redesigned and rebuilt in order to be faster and more flexible. The new UI comes with a new home screen which recommends the best test based on the system specifications and also allows users to update and install each benchmark test independently.

The new 3DMark update also brings a VRMark benchmark preview, which does not produce a score but includes two test scenes from VRMark. The VRMark preview is not available on Basic Edition or the Steam demo versions of the 3DMark and is only available on 3DMark Advanced and 3DMark Professional versions. The new 3DMark update also adds both the Ice Storm Extreme and Ice Storm Unlimited benchmarks to the 3DMark Basic Edition version. It also updates the SystemInfo module to v4.43 which should improve hardware detection.

When it comes to bug fixes, the new 3DMark version fixes an issue seen with AMD driver where the preview videos in the UI caused some AMD graphics card to use low-power mode.

The official press slides for the recently announced Radeon Pro Duo graphics card also brought the first performance figures from 3DMark FireStrike benchmark where the new dual-GPU graphics card is significantly faster than the GTX Titan Z.

Bear in mind that these results come from AMD so they should be taken with a grain of salt. According to details, the benchmark was done on a test system with Intel Core i7-5960X CPU, 16GB of RAM and Windows 10 OS, running with AMD 15.301 drivers and Geforce 361.91 drivers. The Radeon Pro Duo was compared to the Radeon R9 295X2 and Nvidia's flaghip dual-GPU GTX Titan Z graphics card.

According to the result, which you can see below, the Radeon Pro Duo is significantly faster than both of the aforementioned graphics cards and by quite a margin. While 1080p and 1440p resolutions are nice to see, the 4K/UHD is a bit more interesting as that is where the Radeon Pro Duo really shines, which does not come as a surprise considering that it is based on the same Fiji GPU as the Radeon Fury X.

In case you missed it earlier, the AMD Radeon Pro Duo is based on two fully-enabled Fiji GPUs, has 8GB of High Bandwidth Memory (4GB per GPU) and offers 16 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance. It also comes with a liquid cooling solution coming from Cooler Master, just like the Radeon Fury X.

AMD announced that the Radeon Pro Duo will be available in early Q2 2016 with a price tag of US $1499.

Futuremark has released the new 3DMark Holiday Beta update for its 3DMark benchmarking software which brings both a new UI for 3DMark as well as a preview for the upcoming VRMark benchmark.

The new 3DMark Holiday Beta update includes the new 3DMark interface that will be officially available in 2016, which promises to be faster, more flexible and more intuitive. The interface includes the new "Home Screen" with the recommended benchmark for your systems.

In addition to the new interface, Futuremark said that it has rebuilt the internals of the 3DMark benchmark which will allow users to download, install and update benchmarks independently, thus making downloads and updates much smaller and allowing users to install and update only the tests that they actually need.

The new 3DMark Holiday Beta update also includes an interactive preview of VRMark, Futuremark's upcoming virtual reality (VR) benchmark. Preview will also users to move freely within one of VRMark's test environments and works both with and without VR headsets. The preview will not produce a score and it is only included for entertainment purposes.

Vince "K|NGP|N" Lucido has broken three 3DMark World single card records by pushing the EVGA Geforce GTX 980 Ti K|NGP|N Edition to 2200MHz for the GPU on LN2.

Vince "K|NGP|N" Lucido is a well known name in the overclocking circles and previously, he managed to break quite a few records with the same EVGA Geforce GTX 980 Ti K|NGP|N Edition graphics card so it does not come as a surprise that the same graphics card broke three new 3DMark world records. This time, Vince managed to push the GPU to a rather stunning 2200MHz on LN2, showing that EVGA GTX 980 Ti K|NGP|N Edition was certainly made for overclocking.

In addition to the EVGA Geforce GTX 980 Ti K|NGP|N Edition graphics card, the rest of the system included an Intel Core i7-5960X CPU overclocked to 5767MHz, an EVGA's X99 motherboard and 16GB of DDR4 memory.

According to the 3DMark Hall of Fame, Vince "K|NGP|N" Lucido now holds the first place in 3DMark Fire Strike, Fire Strike Extreme and Fire Strike Ultra benchmarks done on a single graphics card.

While overclocking the GTX 980 Ti GPU to 2200MHz is certainly an impressive result, we are cheering for Vince to push it even further.

As we draw closer to the official unveil of AMD's Radeon 300 series lineup and the Radeon Fury flagship lineup, it does not come as a surprise that we now have some of the first unconfirmed 3DMark results where alleged Radeon Fury X graphics card is trading blows with the Geforce Titan X.

According to a set of results compiled by Videocardz.com and taken from 3DMark FireStrike Ultra and FireStrike Extreme benchmarks, the Fiji XT-based AMD Radeon Fury X, is trading blows with Nvidia GM200 Maxwell-based Geforce GTX Titan X. According to the posted results and the combined table, the Radeon Fury X is actually faster than the GTX Titan X in FireStrike Ultra at 4K/UHD 3840x2160 resolution but slight slower in FireStrike Extreme at 2560x1440 resolution.

While this is just a synthetic benchmark and does not show the real world and gaming performance it is a good starting point and gives us a general idea regarding the performance of the Radeon Fury X.

Appearently, AMD Radeon Fury X also does good in Crossfire mode as two AMD Fury X graphics cards are pretty close to GTX Titan X in SLI. The Radeon Fury X also beats the reference clocked GTX 980 Ti while it looses from an overclocked GTX 980 Ti working at 1220MHZ for the GPU and 1900MHz for the memory. The Radeon Fury X is clocked at 1050MHz for the GPU and 500MHz (1000MHz effective) for 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory.

Judging from these early results, High Bandwidth Memory and 4096-bit memory interface on the Radeon Fury X certainly does wonders and we can't wait to see some of the first results from actual games.

The Fiji XT based Radeon Fury X graphics card should debut at AMD's dedicated event on June 16th while first details are expected on June 18th with first reviews scheduled for June 24th. According to our sources, it should be available as of June 24th but you should expect limited availability.

Now that Futuremark has released a new update for 3DMark which brings 3DMark API Overhead benchmark, AMD was quite keen to show some performance figures on its Radeon R9 290X graphics card, as well as performance scaling on the octa-core FX-8370 CPU.

The new API Overhead benchmark update for 3DMark actually compares draw calls on different APIs, comparing DirectX 11, DirectX 12 and Mantle APIs on a single system. AMD followed Futuremark's notes saying that the API Overhead benchmark should not be used to compare GPUs from different vendors and has only showed the draw call throughput between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 on Radeon R9 290X and the R7 260X graphics cards.

The upcoming DirectX 12 API will also have a certain impact on performance scaling on multi-threaded CPUs. With the octa-core FX-8370 CPU AMD managed to get DirectX 12 to scale with up to six cores, while DirectX 11 is limited to two cores.

While it is nice to see that AMD's hardware works well with DirectX 12 and that we can see some rather impressive performance gains, bear in mind that these are still just synthetic benchmarks and real-world performance is usually something completely different. Of course, the numbers do look quite promising and there are plenty of things to look forward with the release of DirectX 12 and DirectX 12 games, which should be ready by the end of this year.

Futuremark has released a new 3DMark update with the new API Overhead feature test, meant to measure the difference in DirectX 11, DirectX 12 and Mantle API performance.

The new API Overhead feature test for 3DMark was developed with input from AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft and other members of the Futuremark Benchmark Development program and compares the relative performance of DirectX 11, DirectX 12 and Mantle on a single system.

Since the new API Overhead feature test is not a general-purpose GPU benchmark, according to Futuremark, it should not be used to compare graphics card from different vendors as Futuremark is promising a DirectX 12 benchmark with game-like workloads, which should be available after the public launch of Windows 10 OS.

According to Futuremark, API overhead is quite important and with the recent talk that new graphics APIs let developers get "close to the metal", something that we have seen with AMD's Mantle API and will see with DirectX 12. Lower overhead can be achieved by making better use of multi-core CPUs, which eliminates software bottlenecks, especially with draw calls.

Futuremark explained that these draw calls occur when the CPU tells the GPU to draw an object on the screen and with game typically making thousand of draw calls per frame, these also create performance-limiting overhead for the CPU. With the ever rising number of draw calls, graphics engines are limited by API performance and the result of the new test shows the maximum number of draw calls per second by each API before the frame rate drops below 30 FPS.

In order to run the new 3DMark API Overhead feature-set DirectX 12 test you'll need up-to-date Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 10041 or later), 4GB of RAM, and DirectX feature level 11_0 graphics card. For the Mantle test, you'll need 4GB of RAM and, of course, AMD GPU with support for Mantle API, while the DirectX 11 test also needs 4GB of RAM and DirectX feature level 11_0 hardware with at least 1GB of VRAM.

The new 3DMark update v1.5.884 also fixes a bug that could cause the Sky Diver demo to hang at the cave entrance scene as well as adds some other minor updates.

The API Overhead feature test is available now in the latest version of 3DMark Advanced Edition and 3DMark Professional Edition while the Steam version of 3DMark updates automatically. Unfortunately, it is not available for the free 3DMark Basic Edition or the Steam demo.